sleepiness check

A blood test is proposed to determine lack of sleep in drivers

Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science

Statistics constantly point to the danger of overwork and lack of sleep for drivers and in general people who manage transport and its movement – pilots, machinists, dispatchers. According to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, the lack of just a couple of hours of sleep increases the risk of an accident by almost half. And if the police in the foreseeable future are unlikely to check drivers "for a rash," then transport companies and air carriers may well supplement their employees' regular drug tests with an analysis of their sleep state.

This opportunity opens up a new work by Professor Simon Archer of the University of Surrey (Simon Archer). In an article published in the journal Sleep (Laing et al., Identifying and validating blood mRNA biomarkers for acute and chronic insufficient sleep in humans: a machine learning approach), Archer and his colleagues talk about the isolation of biomarkers from the blood indicating acute sleep deprivation.

To participate in the experiments, 36 healthy volunteers were selected, from whom blood samples were taken after a sleepless night or a week of chronic sleep deprivation (less than six hours of sleep). Matrix RNA (mRNA) was isolated from the blood – relatively short fragments synthesized from active genes for the production of proteins – in order to identify characteristic biomarkers among them that could indicate a lack of sleep.

Finding suitable markers among the entire variety of mRNAs would be a long and painstaking task, but scientists assigned this task to a specially created computer program using complex statistical methods and artificial intelligence. This made it possible to identify a total of 68 genes, according to which it is possible to speak with high confidence (92 percent) about acute lack of sleep.

On the other hand, the accuracy of predicting chronic sleep deprivation was much lower – only 57 percent. According to the authors, this condition could also be determined, but this requires having a blood sample of the same person in advance after a sufficient amount of sleep, which is hardly possible in practice.

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